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Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Marvel Team-Up: Spider-Man and The Patriarchy

It isn’t news
that fathers are often portrayed as doofuses in pop culture. An interesting aspect of the Spider-Man
movies is how aggressively they buck this trend. The theme of fatherhood and its
responsibilities absolutely permeates the series. The noblest characters are almost all either father
figures or those who honor father figures.
When father figures are portrayed negatively, it is always because they
have failed to live up to the responsibilities of fatherhood, which the series
clearly honors. Indeed, once you first
note this aspect of the series, you start seeing it everywhere. The Spider-Man movies constitute one big
patriarchy-fest.

Consider
first the three Sam Raimi Spider-Man flicks (spoilers ahead):

Spider-Man (2002): Two father figures dominate
the story: the orphaned Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben and Harry Osborn’s father
Norman, who becomes the Green Goblin.
Uncle Ben is portrayed as a stable provider for his family and a gentle
but firm moral guide. He reproves Peter
for failing to live up to his obligations, insisting that “with great power
comes great responsibility.” The tragic
theme of the movie is that Uncle Ben is murdered precisely because Peter fails
to heed him. Peter’s motivation as
Spider-Man is to redeem himself for this failure and to honor his uncle’s
memory by using his power responsibly, to protect others rather than to seek
wealth, glory, or the like.

If the
weakling Doofus Dad of pop culture fails by way of defect -- by way, that is,
of being insufficiently masculine, insufficiently fatherly -- the kind but
steady Uncle Ben gets fatherhood just right.
Norman Osborn, meanwhile, is portrayed as a man who sins by excess. He is no doofus or shirker but a driven man
who has accomplished much and whose provision of Harry’s material needs could not be improved upon. However, he is emotionally distant and absorbed
in his work to the point of neglect of his son.
And he crosses the line into outright evil precisely as a reaction to
losing what he has accomplished as a
man and a father -- when his company is forcibly taken from him, effectively
emasculating him.

Just as
Peter seeks to honor the memory of Uncle Ben, Harry seeks, without apparent
success, to make his father proud. Peter,
by contrast, does win the approval of Norman, who becomes for Peter another
father figure of sorts. But in contrast
to Uncle Ben, Norman tempts Peter to use his power for self-aggrandizement
rather than responsibly. The movie thus
establishes the central theme running throughout the Raimi Spider-Man flicks: two
fathers, Uncle Ben and Norman, one exemplary and the other fallen; and two
sons, Peter and Harry, both flawed but both seeking to redeem themselves in the
eyes of a father figure. Peter follows
Uncle Ben, and is redeemed; Harry follows Norman into corruption.

Then there
are the more subtle allusions to the theme of fatherhood and its
responsibilities. There are brief
portrayals of the abusiveness of Mary Jane’s father. The people Peter/Spider-Man most prominently protects
or provides for are women and children -- Mary Jane, Aunt May, a young boy at a
parade, a Roosevelt Island tram car full of children, who the Green Goblin
threatens to kill. In a terrifically over-the-top
scene, Aunt May is even shown praying the Our Father -- with a picture of
Uncle Ben nearby -- only to have the evil father figure, the Green Goblin,
burst in as if by way of contrast.

Spider-Man 2 (2004): As with Norman Osborn, Otto
Octavius (a.k.a. Doctor Octopus) -- the villain of the second Raimi movie -- is
a surrogate father figure to Peter who sins by excess and turns evil when he
loses what he has accomplished. (In
Octavius’s case, this happens when, as a result of his arrogance, he causes an
accident which kills his wife, fuses a set of robotic tentacles onto his body,
and nearly destroys the city.)

Norman
Osborn is a continuing presence in this movie too, as Harry tries -- and fails
-- successfully to run the company his late father started, and is urged by a
ghostly vision of Norman to avenge his death.
Finding his father’s Green Goblin weaponry, he prepares to step into his
shoes as a super-villain. Meanwhile,
Peter’s own mission of redeeming himself after inadvertently causing Uncle Ben’s
death is reemphasized, as he reveals to Aunt May that he was at fault.

We even see
Peter’s boss J. Jonah Jameson portrayed as a father, as the movie introduces his
son John Jameson as Peter’s rival for Mary Jane’s affections.

Spider-Man 3 (2007): Raimi’s last Spider-Man
movie piles on the fatherhood-related elements.
The imperative to avenge a fallen father figure drives not only Harry, who
takes aggressive action against Peter/Spider-Man (whom he blames for Norman’s
death), but also Peter, who discovers that one of Uncle Ben’s killers (the
Sandman) is still alive, and hunts him down.
The Sandman, in turn (whose killing of Uncle Ben turns out to have been
accidental), is portrayed as a misguided father whose crimes are motivated by a
desire to help his ailing daughter. We
also meet Captain Stacy, the father of Peter’s friend Gwen.

The failures
of father figures and son figures are highlighted throughout. Harry is once again haunted by a vision of
his father, whose malign influence continues to lurk in the background of the series. Harry’s insecurities about living up to
Norman’s legacy are cruelly mocked by Peter during one of their battles. Eddie Brock (a.k.a. Venom), who is in love
with Gwen, evidently fails to impress Captain Stacy and disgraces himself with
his employer Jonah Jameson. The Sandman’s
wife chides him for his failures as a father.
Peter laments his rudeness to Mr. Ditkovitch, his landlord and the
father of his friend Ursula. Peter’s temporary
turn to the dark side (under the influence of the Venom symbiote) is a failure
to live up to Uncle Ben’s admonition that with great power comes great
responsibility.

The
Amazing Spider-Man (2012): The fatherhood theme is if anything even more pronounced in the
new series of Spider-Man movies. In both
of the recent movies, Peter is haunted by the questions of what happened to his
late father, Richard Parker, and why he abandoned Peter when he was a child. Conflict with Gwen’s father Captain Stacy, who
becomes another surrogate father figure to Peter, also becomes a major theme of
the new series. Uncle Ben’s gentle but
firm guidance and Peter’s quest to redeem himself for inadvertently enabling Ben’s
death continue as key elements as well. Like
Norman Osborn and Otto Octavius in the original movies, Curt Connors -- who
becomes the Lizard, the movie’s villain -- is yet another father figure to
Peter who turns to evil.

There’s a
scene where Spider-Man saves a man’s little boy, after which he observes the affection
between the father and his son and is perhaps reminded of what he has missed
out on with his own father. A new
imperative, distinct from Peter’s need to redeem himself for Uncle Ben’s death,
enters the series at the end of the movie: A dying Captain Stacy makes Peter
promise to stay away from Gwen, lest she be harmed by her association with
him. But Peter indicates that this is a
promise he will not keep.

The Amazing
Spider-Man 2
(2014): Just as Harry was haunted by visions of his father Norman in the Raimi
Spider-Man movies, Peter, having broken the promise he made at the end of the
previous movie, is haunted in this one by visions of Captain Stacy. Norman Osborn is also a background presence
in this movie, and the dysfunctional father-son dynamic between him and Harry is
reintroduced into the series. Peter’s
own father, Richard, is vindicated, as we learn that he had good, indeed
heroic, reasons for abandoning Peter.

Peter himself
will feel less heroic by the end of the movie, though, as his broken promise to
Captain Stacy results in exactly what the captain feared -- Gwen’s death.

The main
themes of the Spider-Man movies would thus seem to be that fathers fail precisely
when they are inadequately fatherly (Norman Osborn and the other father figures
turned villains), and that sons fail when they disobey good fathers, with those
who depend on these father figures suffering as a result (Peter, Aunt May, and
Gwen). At least in the cases of Uncle
Ben, Richard Parker, and Captain Stacy, Father
knows best.

11 comments:

Obviously, the constant patriarchal references in Spiderman are a kind of 'signature' that prove that an intelligent being must have designed him. It just can't be any other way. What else would we expect from the God who is, after all, the Supreme Patriarch?

When I come to think of it, a number of super heroes have good father figures: Superman's biological and adoptive fathers are both good fathers. Thor's father Odin is mostly a good father. Iron Man's father, though he failed, tried to be good, and if I remember Iron Man II was about the reconciliation of father and son. Batman's father was good.

No, I don't think Spiderman is the lone exception in displaying the importance of fathers.

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.